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Congressman Ellison’s Story

Should one thank Congressman Peter King for giving us the chance to hear Congressman Keith Ellison speak Thursday, movingly, about a paramedic named Mohammed Salman Hamdani—an American Muslim, as it happened—who rushed to help on September 11, 2001, and was killed when the towers fell? The setting for Ellison’s story was a hearing King had convened under the rubric “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response.” (How many assumptions are packed into that title?) Ellison broke down as he spoke about how Hamdani died, and the conspiracy theories he was swept up in, and it’s hard not to do the same when watching him speak:

Mr. Hamdani bravely sacrificed his life to try and help others on 9/11. After the tragedy some people tried to smear his character solely because of his Islamic faith. Some people spread false rumors and speculated that he was in league with the attackers only because he was Muslim. It was only when his remains were identified that these lies were fully exposed.

Hamdani was twenty-three when he died. He grew up in Queens, went to high school in Bayside, and, Ellison noted, had a vanity license plate that read “Yung Jedi.” One could say that he belonged to “the American Muslim Community,” or rather one of many American Muslim communities (there’s a lot of diversity there, and no membership card). He also belonged to the New York City community, and the community of Star Wars fans, and, more generally, to America.

It’s good to be reminded of that. We can spare King the gratitude, though. Ellison was invited in as a member of Congress (he is a Muslim himself) but otherwise the witness list is designed to make what seems to be King’s main point: something frightening is happening in Muslim American homes. There has been a lot of shouting on this theme lately, and King’s hearings are, in a sense, an attempt to organize those voices into a chorus. (Ellison knows something about that, having been criticized for taking his congressional oath holding a Koran—never mind that the Koran was from the library of Thomas Jefferson.) One could dismiss this all as political theatre, but it has a real effect on people’s lives, civil liberties (including the freedom to worship), and, also, on all of our safety. As Ellison pointed out, pushing aside and alienating the next generation of American Muslims is not a good way to deal with radicalization: “The best defense against extremist ideologies is social inclusion and civic engagement.”

That sort of inclusion is supposed to be what we are good at here. King’s past support of the I.R.A. has opened him up for criticism about hypocrisy, but, beyond that, one wishes that he saw, in Muslim Americans today, something of the experience that Irish Americans and a couple of dozen other immigrant groups have shared: of being treated as outsiders, even when, in America, one is actually in one’s own home. (That said, it’s good to keep in mind that not all American Muslims are immigrants or even immigrants’ children—far from it.) Instead, there seems to be an insistence that the different ones are really, really different this time. In a novel that King wrote, with a hero the Times describes as “a congressman who must thwart a planned ‘dirty bomb’ attack by Qaeda operatives,” an expert tells the Congressman that

The Muslim community is the most radical and terrorist of any immigrant group that has ever come to this country…. And this has been going on for the past 10 to 15 years…. Most of the micks over here who supported the I.R.A. considered themselves 100 percent pro-American, and believe me these Muslims don’t.

Actually, I don’t believe it. The contrast between King’s false prose, with its faux tough talk—needless to say, one of the characters is a striking redhead with a past—and Ellison’s simple narrative, is just one of many reasons why.

Also, stories like the one Ellison told have been available all along, if we listened and looked for—or even just did not look away from—them. King didn’t need to dig this one up. It shouldn’t take the pain in Ellison’s voice for us to realize that fear-mongering about our fellow citizens is wrong, or who our neighbors are—just as it shouldn’t have taken the discovery of Hamdani’s body in the ruins of the towers to realize what sort of person he was.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.